Dogged CATs

By

Jim McTague

Aug. 10, 1998 12:01 a.m. ET

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T here he goes again. Rep. David McIntosh of Muncie, Indiana, is acting like Ronald Reagan's own Saint Paul, preaching the gospel of smaller government, less regulation and lower taxes, trying to keep the Gipper's foundering revolution alive on Capitol Hill. McIntosh's passion for Reaganism, which began when he was a freshman and a Democrat at Yale, has helped him become a rising star in a seemingly rudderless Republican Party in Congress. And, despite his relative youth -- he's 40 -- and lack of seniority, he has emerged as one of the more influential voices in the House of Representatives.

Not only is McIntosh able to call other conservative lawmakers to action. He also can bring pressure to bear from conservative interest groups like the Christian Coalition, the Family Research Council and Americans for Tax Reform, all to which he has cultivated close links. Pressure brought by McIntosh and other conservatives has stopped the House GOP's apparent retreat from the conservative principles that brought it to power in 1994. The agenda aims to minimize capital-gains taxes and other levies that reduce return on investments. It also takes aim at federal red tape that trips up businesses.

"McIntosh is going to have a lot of choices," says Presidential contender Dan Quayle, a friend and longtime political mentor. Campaigning by the former Vice President in 1994 helped McIntosh pull an upset in his first congressional race. A visit by Quayle, then a House member, to East Noble High School in Kendallville, Indiana, when McIntosh was a student there in the 'Seventies, fed the youngster's budding interest in politics.

"He can stay in the House of Representatives and move up the ladder there, possibly run for the Senate some day, or run for governor," says Quayle. "He's clearly been earmarked by the Republican Party for leadership positions."

When onetime Reagan aide McIntosh arrived in Congress in 1994, his reputation preceded him. Two years earlier he had been executive director of Vice President Quayle's Competitiveness Council and had won the admiration of his party for attacking the Environmental Protection Agency, in the process making political adversaries of high-powered Democrats like Rep. Henry Waxman of California and Rep. John Dingell of Michigan. "He breaks china and makes things happen," says Ken Duberstein, who was President Reagan's chief of staff when McIntosh was an aide.

Upon his return to Washington as a congressman, the GOP's House leadership immediately bestowed on McIntosh the chairmanship of the brand-new Subcommittee on National Economic Growth, Natural Resources and Regulatory Affairs. Not accidentally, the purview of the subcommittee was very much like the purview of the Competitiveness Council, which was abolished when Bill Clinton became President.

Almost immediately, the subcommittee became one of the most controversial and action-packed groups in the new Congress. McIntosh began lobbing grenades at the Clinton Administration's White House fund-raising operations and took aim at clean-air and clean-water regulations then under consideration by the EPA staff. He viewed the regulations as both unnecessary and antibusiness. Critics have accused him of unfair tactics, and have even charged that he used a forged document to tar a civil-rights group during a hearing on a bill to limit lobbying activities. (A complaint over the incident, which involved a press handout that featured the group's letterhead, was dismissed by the House Ethics Committee.) And he has been labeled a hypocrite for attacking fund-raising by Clinton because he often meets on committee business with big donors to his campaign. But none of these charges have done him any damage.

This year, McIntosh's high regard for Reaganism landed him the chairmanship of the House's Conservative Action Team, an influential band of about 40 right-wing Republicans better known by the acronym CATs. The group was founded in 1995 by Rep. Dan Burton of Indiana, Rep. John Doolittle of California, Rep. Ernest Istook of Oklahoma and Rep. Sam Johnson of Texas. At the time, moderate Republicans were arguing that tax cuts proposed by the leadership were too high in light of the fact that the budget wasn't balanced. The CATs, says one person closely associated with the group, wanted to make sure that "the tip of the tail didn't wag the dog."

In its early years, the group rotated its leadership from meeting to meeting. Rep. Johnson said this year they decided it might be more efficient to go with a chairman. "We picked McIntosh because he had been part of CATs from the start, and he exemplified everything we were trying to do. He favors less taxes, less government and a downsized bureaucracy. Plus, he is able to pull in some of the younger members," he says.

The CATs have clawed their way into the leadership's office to assist Speaker Newt Gingrich in maintaining a legislative course that reflects their philosophy of government. Communication was poor in the past -- a lot of hissing and scratching. With the brash McIntosh at the helm, the organization seems to be having genuine impact as an eminence grise. Swayed in part by their influence, Gingrich last month began calling for a cut in the capital-gains rates to 15%. It's one of the most substantial conservative positions Gingrich has taken in almost two years. The CATs also managed to get their version of an appropriations bill, with $100 million in budget cuts, through the House, despite fierce opposition from the Clinton White House. The Senate, which is dominated by a more moderate style of Republicanism, may agree to about $65 million of those proposed cuts. That's not perfect, but it's more than the conservatives have gotten since 1994 and 1995, when the GOP enjoyed a 235-seat majority because of election gains and party-switching.

In politics, where ideas age as fast as dogs, it seems like ancient history to talk about the 1994 election, which ushered in a confident Gingrich and a radically conservative class of freshmen like McIntosh who rammed through the House nine of the 10 items contained in an audacious document dubbed The Contract With America. In those heady days for the GOP, the Republicans forced President Clinton to reform the welfare system and to take other steps toward balancing the federal budget. But during the intervening period, the GOP became a party in retreat, reluctant to pursue the revolutionary goals that first brought it control of the House. Firebrand Gingrich, chastened by GOP losses at the polls in 1996 and a fund-raising scandal, appeared to have grown weak in the knees. In 1996 voters allowed the GOP to retain control of Congress, but with a narrower majority in the House than in 1994. The GOP won 227 seats versus 207 plus Independent Bernard Sanders of Vermont for the Democrats.

"To some, that move from confrontation to cooperation was a philosophical change -- but that's not true," says DeLay.

The CATs were among those who favored confrontation. In 1997 several of its members were part of an unsuccessful attempt to oust Gingrich from the Speaker's office and replace him with the more conservative Bill Paxon of New York. Republican critics of the CATs say that at the time the organization served as a gripe session, where members spent their time running down the leadership. The lack of civil discourse between the two factions led often to knock-down interparty fights on the House floor. This public airing of dirty laundry resulted in the perception that the GOP was fragmented.

"The GOP adopted a strategy -- let's not be too strong on any one issue and make waves," says McIntosh, who played a very minor role in the failed plot against Gingrich. "Then the scandal with the President erupted and the leadership believed it made sense to let it play out. But the CATs said all along that this approach was not enough. We believed we had to give people a reason why we should have a Republican majority, based on our principles. Our party's popularity declined because there was no difference between the Democrats and the Republicans," says McIntosh.

The coup attempt resulted in a positive outcome for the party. It was a wake-up call for Gingrich to work out a compromise with the CATs. And the CATs themselves realized they had to bend more, says DeLay. "They learned they had to accept less than the whole pie." The maturation of the CATs is one of the better inside stories on the Hill this year. In the past, the CATs didn't appreciate that they could pass only things for which they had votes, says DeLay. Staffers recall that moderate Republicans were shunning conservative proposals as being too radical and joining forces with moderate Democrats like the New Dogs and the Blue Dogs to pass legislation considered more middle-of-the-road and more acceptable to Clinton. Moderate Republicans didn't want to stand accused of shutting down the government again.

Says DeLay, "In the beginning the CATs reasoned that because we were in the majority, things ought to be happening, not realizing how close the voting margin was."

Under McIntosh, the CATs adopted a different strategy. The leadership agreed it would help bring bills out of committee that reflected a GOP point of view. "We'd then go through the whole process and try to hold on to as much of the original proposal as we could," says DeLay.

The CATs extracted a price for their cooperation. They made the leadership adopt an aggressive GOP agenda in 1998, an election year. Says McIntosh, "We went to the leadership and said, 'It is important to have major tax cuts. Do something about eliminating the marriage penalty and that's how we'll keep our majority.' We didn't want to bet the House on whether or not President Clinton is harmed by a scandal because it's beyond our control."

McIntosh says Gingrich is still more liberal than he was back in 1994. But he says the Speaker is beginning to embrace fundamental conservative positions like lowering taxes, saving Social Security, improving the quality of education and stopping drug abuse.

"I think Newt realized he had to be more conservative to be a successful Speaker and I am very happy about it," says McIntosh.

One thing McIntosh isn't happy about is Gingrich's lukewarm pursuit of tax cuts. The CATs currently are pressuring the Speaker and the House leadership to pursue a bold tax-cut bill in the House so that Republicans can differentiate themselves from the Democrats in November. They say the government is taking in more revenues than it needs even to save Social Security, and that the money ought to be returned to the taxpayers before Washington fritters it away.

Gingrich, however, is caught up in a hair-splitting game of political strategy. He has several options for a more modest tax-cut proposal this year, each one dependent on President Clinton's popularity in September when Congress returns from a recess that began on Friday. If the Lewinsky scandal has seriously weakened the President, eroding his popularity among the public and in his own party, the GOP may push for $70-$80 billion in tax cuts over five years. If, however, the weakened President reaches out to Congress' liberal wing and finds support there, Gingrich would propose pushing for about $30 billion in tax cuts. Either way, the Speaker last week publicly indicated his willingness to turn the argument over Social Security and tax cuts into a campaign issue this fall, a tribute, in part, to the effectiveness of the CATs.

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